How to provide value to your awards judges

Attracting credible judges to your awards program can be beneficial to your program, your participants and your brand reputation. Besides bringing integrity to the program’s judging process, it expands your brand’s reach and brings greater recognition to your awards program. 

However, to attract judges to your program in the first place, it’s important to provide value to them in exchange for their expertise.

What matters to judges and how can you ensure they get value?

Let’s look at the various ways to provide value to your awards judges.  

1. Reputation

Being selected to judge an awards program suggests that one has incredible knowledge of an industry. It adds extra renown to the judges’ names. Judges care about the impact of your awards program on their standing. If it enhances their profile, they’ll be eager to participate. 

To improve their recognition, leverage a public webpage that markets the awards program and highlights the judges and their expertise. The awards program’s dedicated website or your email newsletters can also come in handy; you can write biographies about your key judges and their accomplishments in their careers and publish them there. 

You can also produce multimedia content featuring the judges. Whether it’s an article about their experience judging awards programs, a recording of an interview of the judges or a video of the judges discussing industry hot takes, creating and publishing this content will better shine the spotlight on their participation. 

Social media can also help you fetch the judges more publicity. As you make announcements about your awards program, you can link to relevant pages on the program’s website where the judges’ profiles are featured. Tag them so they can re-share with their communities. 

In Award Force, you can create an about page to showcase the judges or create a public gallery of judges with their bios, photos and more. It’s a great way to keep your judges in the limelight on your awards platform. 

2. Time and personal experience

Your judges are important people, and it’s prudent to keep their time commitment and personal experience with your program at the forefront. Judging an awards program requires a time investment, so optimising your processes to save time demonstrates that you respect the judges’ time.

Also, they want to have an exciting and easy experience judging your awards entries. They will not want to learn new software to complete their judging assignments. Thankfully, there are a variety of ways to save the judges’ time and improve their experience.

Create an eligibility screener to divert ineligible entries

A huge part of effective time management for your judges is trimming down the workload of each judge. Create an eligibility screener that automatically diverts entries that don’t meet your basic requirements. This can save your expert judges a lot of time ensuring the basics of each entry.  

Moderate submissions in a qualifying round

A great way to create a good experience for your judges is to ensure they only see the best entries. In addition to screening entries for eligibility, you can create a qualification round to quickly moderate submissions to eliminate any weak entries. This will reduce the volume of work the judges have to do and present them with entries that are interesting and worth their attention. Award Force’s entry moderation feature can help support a qualifying round for your entries. 

Provide only relevant details 

Award Force is geared to help you save your judges’ time. Its features ensure that only details relevant to the judges are seen in each submission. An example of this is providing embedded PDFs with all the entry information in one place–without having to click off the page. It enables them to focus on what matters and avoid any extraneous details.

You can also provide an easy judging experience by creating a contextual entry form that only asks for the information your judges need to make good decisions.  Learn how to create an entry form your judges will love.

3. Communication 

Being in the know is very important to judges; the weight of their responsibilities requires them to have access to information ahead of others. Since they validate your awards program, they need to be aware of what’s going on. 

There are many efficient ways to communicate and engage with the judges. For example:

• Provide your judges with the details of the program before it kicks off.
• Leverage Award Force’s content blocks to give specific information to the judges during your judging rounds.
• Communicate with them often. You can do this through the Award Force platform. Send assignment updates; program updates; deadline notifications and more! 
• Request feedback from the judges when the program ends. Find out what they think about the program and their suggestions for improvement.
• Collect quotes from them at the end of the program. These quotes could be about what distinguished the winning entries from others or helpful tips for next season’s entrants.
• Share their profiles on social media, tagging and thanking them for their participation. 

Besides maintaining your interaction with them, these gestures show you appreciate their time, expertise and involvement. 

Want to create a community for your judges? Consider inviting them to private group spaces online like Slack or LinkedIn, where you can discuss the awards program or provide a way for them to ask questions, network and learn more about your awards. 

Involving credible judges is a fantastic way to expand your brand reach and reputation in the industry and community. Delivering value to them will make them return for subsequent seasons, leading to steady growth of your program. 

The tips discussed above will ensure your judges enjoy your awards program, stay in touch and look forward to the coming seasons. Want more tips? Download our free ebook on how to attract judges and keep them coming back.